Gilded pills in the medical chest on board the warship Kronan

Abstract

Two glass jars containing organic matter sprinkled with gold flakes, a bundle of gold foil and a hemi-spherical wooden bowl with traces of gold adhering to its concave inner surface have been recovered from the wreck of the 17th century Swedish man-of-war HMS Kronan. The finds provide evidence of the medical use of elemental gold on board. The pharmaceutical and medical significance of the finds has been deduced from their positions relative to other objects of unequivocal character. Samples of meta! fragments from all four objects have been shown to be gold by energy dispersive spectroscopy in a scanning electron microscope (EDS/SEM). The wooden bowl is the lower half of an apothecary's tool for gilding (or silvering) pills, a procedure described in mid-late 17th cen-tury European textbooks on pharmaceuticals that requires a supply of gold (or silver) foil. Such pills and other similarly confected medications, together with their contexts, are likely to be connected with a specific social stratum of persons of rank, possibly belonging to the aristocratic officers on board the ship. One may also argue that the homogeneity of the medical contexts recovered at the wreck site, reflects the professional structure of medicine as a science at that time.